Filip Eriksson had been out injured for most of his draft season; a battle along the boards in his second SHL game concluded with a broken scaphoid bone. He returned to be part of the Le Mat Trophy-winning Växjö Lakers team at the end of the season. In the end, Eriksson was drafted by the Montreal Canadiens in Round 6 of the 2023 NHL Draft. At that time there was next to nothing known about the player who had stayed an extra year with his home team Troja-Ljungby instead of moving over to Växjö at an earlier stage. However, that year in Troja-Ljungby was a season for the ages, and more scouts really should have seen the potential
Speaking to a few people in Sweden’s vast hockey community, a few things stood out: Växjö had tried to recruit Eriksson for a few years, they signed him to a contract when he got injured even if he hadn’t played many minutes on the SHL team, and both assistant GM Patrik Hall and coach Jörgen Jönsson couldn’t stop talking about Eriksson’s qualities as a player. The question was if this was a a team building up a player, or if it was something that the scouting community as a whole had missed.
This season started out quite well for Eriksson. He got to play in the SHL, but again with limited minutes. While his production was limited, his underlying numbers were still on an expected level or even better in regard to his draft position since he outproduced other forwards from the same draft in the SHL.
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